Fade to black : picturing mortality in contemporary popular film /

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Abstract

This thesis attempts to understand representations of death in contemporary
popular film within a framework that posits mortality as a category of particular social
and political importance for the way we understand both individual subjectivity and
social responsibility in the postmodern cultural moment. It addresses concerns over the
social organizing categories of time and space, and performs a sustained consideration of
predominant themes related to the popular representation of death, such as contingency,
existential.meaning, and temporal finitude. Death consciousness and social consciousness
are shown to be not just intertwined, but also vitally dependent on one another, and the
analyses undertaken are ultimately aimed at making these intersections explicit in order
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to think through their potential implications for challenging consumer capitalist
hegemony and envisioning the possibility of progressive social change through the lens
of our mortality.